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Star Stuff: An Exploratory Case Study of the Cosmos Television Franchise

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Speaker John McCormack of Massachusetts introduced the Apollo 11 crew members before a Joint Meeting of Congress. The moment marked the culmination of a determined American effort to defeat the Soviet Union in a “space race” that began with the launch of Sputnik by the Soviets in 1957. “We are honoring today three men who represent the best in America and whose coordinated skill, fantastic daring, and visionary drive have made history that constitutes a turning point of paramount importance in the journey of mankind,” Speaker McCormack proclaimed. Each astronaut—Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, and Michael Collins—addressed the enthusiastic audience about their successful moon landing on July 20, 1969. Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, acknowledged the role of the House and Senate in the successful mission. “It was here, in these Halls that our venture really began”—a reference to the legislation that established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the funding of the space program by Congress. Before the conclusion of the meeting, the honorees presented Speaker McCormack and Vice President Spiro Agnew with two American flags that had flown over the respective chambers before being brought onto the moon.

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Who Owns (the) Cosmos? An Epilogue, Prologue, and Intermission While working on this Scalar Project, I was able to explore over 60 years of space exploration history through educational media. Every event that is covered in each section of this project is highlighted in the timeline at the top of this page. One of the things that has stuck with me throughout this experience is a sentiment expressed by Ann Druyan. In a Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey Q&A session embedded in this project, she argues that the information contained in these documentaries is a “birthright” that everyone should be entitled to. This idea is also crystallized in a quote from the original Cosmos: A Personal Voyage that this project is named after. “The cosmos is within us. We are made of starstuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself”. However, in the mission to distribute the findings of cosmology to the public, I believe science communicators could go much further. In this short essay, I will briefly outline three ways that science communicators can improve their work using examples from the Cosmos series. These recommendations include taking a clear stance on social and political issues, using more everyday objects in place of CGI effects for symbolic representations, and engaging with knowledge privatization in their content. Those three recommendations are by no means comprehensive, but I think that discussing them here will encourage us to think about who really owns the knowledge communicated by the Cosmos series: the scientists, the media companies, or everybody on this planet?
Science Communication Needs to Take a Stance on Social and Political Issues
While working on this project, a relative of mine told me that my grandmother, better known as Nan Dawson, was a staunch critic of space exploration while the Cold War space race was unfolding before her eyes. “What a colossal waste of human technological prowess and energy that could be better directed at something more useful” she likely would have thought. When I began this project, I shared similar views on space exploration to that of my late grandmother. Space exploration disinterested me because I perceived it as having nothing to say about present social and political realities here on Earth. This changed when I watched the 1989 update to Cosmos: A Personal Voyages’ final episode, "Who Speaks for Earth". In this six-minute update, Carl Sagan discusses how the study of the runaway greenhouse effect on Venus has helped us better understand climate change’s effects on Earth. This discussion is further expanded upon in episode 12 of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, "The World Set Free". As a result, I've become a lot more sympathetic to what other space exploration missions can reveal about our own planet. These projects include the recently opened James Webb Telescope or the fabled mission to visit the neighboring Alpha Centauri star system depicted at the end of the first episode of Cosmos: Possible Worlds. I have included that clip from Cosmos: Possible Worlds here below.
My change of heart while watching these television series suggests that science communication is most engaging when it is relevant to the everyday lives of its audience. Science communication needs to showcase what endeavors such as space exploration can tell us about ourselves. It must demonstrate that by looking outwardly we might be better able to look inwardly. We cannot pretend that science is somehow impartial or separated from prevailing social inequities and struggles of power within society. The above clip from Possible Worlds opens by comparing the exploration of space to life evolving out of Earth’s Ocean, or "birds beginning to fly". Science communicators should not position what they are talking about as apolitical in this kind of way. It is uncalled for to suggest that space exploration is a natural extension of evolution. Exploration needs to be a conscious and concerted effort that strives to yield meaningful results for those living on Earth. Those with authority over space exploration cannot delude themselves of their agency under the guise of their work being somehow natural, preordained, or inevitable. The questions posed by episode 11 of Cosmos: Possible Worlds, named after the book Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors by Sagan and Druyan, ask viewers to think deeply about who they are in relation to other animals. These revelations, if accepted, would have profound consequences on how they live their lives. I would like to see more of this kind of social and politically conscious content from science communicators moving forward.
Science Communication Should Include Everyday Symbolic Representations
Another way communicators can make the findings of science more tangible for their audiences is by using everyday symbolic representations in place of CGI effects. For all the fantastical computer-generated spectacles in Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, one of my favorite moments was when Tyson used the analogy of walking a dog to explain the difference between climate and weather.
Instances where everyday events activities and objects are used to explain complex concepts are extremely rare in A Spacetime Odyssey and Possible Worlds with Neil deGrasse Tyson. However, they were more commonplace in Cosmos: A Personal Voyage with Sagan. Take for example this sequence where Sagan describes the challenges of conceiving a 4th dimension of experience using pieces of paper, and other household items.
Something about this stripped-down, bare-bones approach to communicating makes science feel inviting and accessible. It is as though the scientist and the layperson have the same set of tools before them for resolving problems at the edge of our understanding. The remake of this sequence in Cosmos: Possible Worlds loses the sense of invitation in my opinion. Its use of special effects doesn’t convey the sense that this is a conversation that the average person can be a part of in the same way.

Though the original Cosmos: A Personal Voyage does later provide its own visualization of the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th dimensions using the ground-breaking special effects of its time, this comparison of these sequences nevertheless illustrates a divergence between the two series. It may be possible that this change in direction for the Cosmos series is indicative of a broader shift in science communication. A shift brought on by growing budgets and advancements in CGI technology. If that is the case, there is room to hope that independent content creators constrained by smaller budgets on video platforms such as YouTube and TikTok could continue this tradition of simplicity. The challenges of creating a long-term knowledge repository on the internet are something that I would now like to discuss in my third recommendation.
Science Communication Needs to Engage with Knowledge Privatization
The question of “why put Cosmos on Fox” is brought up in two interviews from the new Cosmos with Neil deGrasse Tyson and Seth MacFarlane sections of this project. In those interviews, both Tyson and Druyan expressed that they weren’t interested in having a show on networks that already had plenty of science-related content. They wanted to reach a commercial network audience that typically didn't engage with science communication documentaries. That is a perfectly reasonable objective. However, the choice to privatize scientific information rather than release it on a publicly accessible platform has consequences for long-term knowledge dissemination. I think that communicators should take the time to teach the difference between public and private information, where to find publicly available science content, and consider releasing their work on publicly available platforms if possible. I will now demonstrate why having information publicly available online is important by discussing what I have organized for this case study of the Cosmos franchise.
The original Cosmos was the shining star of American public broadcasting for over a decade. Releasing your content on a publicly available network means more than just allowing people to access your show for free without advertisements, it places your work within the public commons where anyone can engage with it. Let's use another poster child of public broadcasting as an example. The painting instructor Bob Ross. His show The Joys of Painting, which ran from 1983 to 1994, has gained an immense resurgence in popularity during the internet age. This is due in part to the fact that any content creator online can watch, react to, and paint along with the program. You can also do this with any episode of Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. All the episodes of the show are available on places like the Internet Archive for you to do whatever you like with online. The same cannot be said for Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey or Possible Worlds. This has consequences that are not truly apparent until you start to engage with the content of the shows. For instance, the four videos I used in this essay when discussing my other two points came from different places online. The first Possible Worlds clip is from an individual YouTube account that likely didn't get copyright approval from the Walt Disney Corporation (who now own Fox and National Geographic). The second clip with the dog from A Spacetime Odyssey and the fourth clip of Tyson describing flatland come from the National Geographics official YouTube channel. The third clip from A Personal Voyage is on the Internet Archive.

That first Possible Worlds clip from the individual YouTube account is at very high risk of being taken down. It would only require someone, not even Disney, to file a report against the video. That would replace the videos window on this Scalar page with an error screen, an issue which is extremely common on other projects I have looked at. Meanwhile, the first and third videos which were officially released through National Geographic are at the second highest risk of leaving. There is nothing stopping National Geographic from taking it down or YouTube changing the metadata my project is using to display the video. This is because YouTube is a private platform that isn't concerned with maintaining a stable source of information for long-term knowledge preservation. Lastly, the A Personal Voyage clip from the Internet Archive is the most likely to stand the test of time. It is a publicly available television show that is hosted on a platform committed to keeping its metadata consistent. The copyright holder is not going to file any sort of claim against the video and the archive is unlikely to change its metadata for no apparent reason.

However, the Internet Archive is not a foolproof place to store information either. There is an ongoing lawsuit that is attempting to take down the internet archive's library of books. Every single book I reference in the sections of this project has a link to their Internet Archive listing. The only exception to that is the recent Cosmos: Possible Worlds book which is not available on the platform. If this lawsuit rules in favor of the publishing companies, all those book links will be rendered useless and people viewing this project will be unable to access them legally for free online.
If the content in this project survives getting taken down for the multitude of reasons I have just mentioned, the long-term sustainability of the internet itself is also a concern. In the work of Druyan after the death of Sagan section of this project, I showcase a website that was commissioned by Cosmos Studios in the mid-2000s. The Adobe Flash platform that this website was built on has since been discontinued and the page is rendered inaccessible without an emulator. Instances like this highlight how unarchived private information is at constant risk of being scrubbed off the face of the internet.

Below is a visualization created using Scalar's tagging system of all the media items that I have included in the project. I have divided them into two categories: Public and Private. If you have a computer mouse, you can use its scroll wheel to zoom out and see more of the visualization. You can also click on the tiny box in the bottom left corner to make it full screen. My goal throughout the project was to include as few private items as possible. Publicly available media outnumbers the private 73 to 19 as a result. It’s only a matter of time until some of these media items begin to disappear from the project. The question is which items will be left standing the longest? In some ways, we can think of this project as a test of who is entitled to the scientific information communicated in these documentaries. The scientific community who conducted the research, the media companies publishing it, or the public whose ‘birthright’ it is to access it? ‘Who’ in fact ‘owns the cosmos’ is the question being posed by this experiment.
This concludes my short essay containing three recommendations for the betterment of future science communication endeavors. I hope that these reflections may have prompted you to think about the connection between information ownership, symbolic representation, and sociopolitical relevance when it comes to science dissemination. You can now return to the Launch Point to explore more of the project or simply select a section you are interested in from the dropdown menu at the top of your screen. If you would like to learn more about the academic underpinnings of this project, along with the process I went through to make it, you can also read my 30-page companion paper. You can find it by clicking the blue button at the bottom of your screen.